by Minrose Gwin
That January I got shot in the right foot and that was the end of it. On the left foot, though I didn’t know it then, I’d already lost two toes from frostbite. My regiment went on without me that spring, into Aubel, where the sun was shining, the grass in the apple orchards already green, where the men finally were able to rest. They sent me to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. At the base hospital I piled on the blankets and asked for more. The nurses said there were birds singing outside. I needed to go sit in the sun. But I hated getting out from under those blankets. When I’d get up to stumble to the john, I’d be shivering all over by the time I got back in bed. More times than not, I’d ask for a bedpan.
Then one day someone put a pen and some paper in my hands, and I wrote to Olivia. She wrote back. When I got to New Orleans in late February, it was hot as blue blazes. She met my bus and, from then on, it was Katy bar the door. She changed her schedule at Higgins Boat Yard so we could stay up to all hours dancing and walking the wet streets, taking in the pickle-brine stink of piss and sweet jasmine. In the mornings I’d watch her sleep, her breath coming soft and regular, her mouth parted like a flower.
A month later she was expecting, which put me over the moon. I bought her a pink suit and we went down to the courthouse and sealed the deal. When she started showing, she lost her job at Higgins, which I told her was bound to happen anyway now that the war was over and old man Higgins had shifted to a small operation and hired back the local boys who had come home and needed jobs.
I thought for sure my boy was on his way. That first one was Grace, who was over a month early and came into the world looking like a plucked chicken. Then June came along eighteen months later. I figured my boy was taking his own good time, teasing me a bit. By then we’d moved back to Opelika for me to take the job at the mill. I was set to live a regular life, an ordinary life, all I’d ever hoped for, all I’d ever dreamed of.
The Battle Babies, the Magnificent 99th we were called, was the most decorated regiment in the war. They’d dropped us into hell and we’d torn down Hitler’s west wall. Nobody, least of all us, thought we’d kick butt like we did. When the time came, I got my medal along with everybody else. I still walk with a limp: a war wound, my dad used to tell people, and his eyes would glow.
THIS IS THE story I would have told my boy, if I’d ever had him. I would have told him that he was a full bowl I carried deep inside without spilling. I would have told him that he got me through. That might have been a lie, it was my shot-up foot that may have saved me in the end. Who’s to say? And who’s to say where a bullet might come from when a foot steps out ahead, into its path?
I was glad to get Grace and June, you bet I was. But I’d waited a long time for my boy. Waiting for him was like sitting outside a church on Sunday morning. I knew the doors would bust wide open one day, and there he’d be. There he’d be, bright as the sun.
What I didn’t tell Olivia: it’s easy to tear a rubber, a pinch of a fingernail, that’s all it took. I did it for my boy. I couldn’t desert him out in that cold outer dark, you see. He was counting on me to bring him home.
Even driving back from the zoo that night, even after sliding into the river and back out again, my two girls waiting at the edge of my mind, even after what Olivia went and did, I still believed my boy would find his way. I thought he’d come home to me, safe and sound. Better late than never, I’d say, and we’d both have a good laugh.
So I didn’t take her to the hospital when she told me what she’d done. I was so sure my boy would find his way home. Now both of them are gone. My lookout, and the enemy came into the house.
6
Grace
A WEEK AFTER MAMA. THE BACKYARD MIMOSA IS A SKELETON, its branches and a few scraggly birds’ nests etched against the winter sky. At supper the three of us sit dazed and bewildered, as if some giant hand has plucked us from distant planets. Bands of late afternoon sun slash our faces so that we look split in two. June and I hunch over our plates, speaking only when we ask for some necessity, no chat, no ease in our talk, our father not asking about our day and we not inquiring after his. Pass the salt. Bread. Our words travel great distances, the simplest phrases sounding alien, untranslatable.
We were two hours late and now our mother is forever circling the winter sky. I made us go to the zoo when we should have been home saving her. My father hates me for this.
Dad slumps over the newspaper that hides his plate. Soon he will dump his food into the garbage while June and I silently clear the table. His cigarette smolders in its ashtray; he lights one off the other. A cloud follows him around the house. I’m afraid I will blink and he will have gone up in smoke. He wants to get supper over with so he can go to his room and close the door and open a bottle of cherry bounce.
June and I pick at the food he’s prepared: barely warmed jars of Chef Boyardee; runny scrambled eggs and toast; pinkish hot dogs served on Sunbeam bread with frozen French fries, still cold at the center. Afterward, we feel uncomfortably full yet dissatisfied, as if someone has blown air into our bellies.
“If I see another dripping hot dog coming at me, I’m going to upchuck right into my plate,” June announces one night after Dad’s second hot dog meal of the week.
We’re sitting on my bed. I’m brushing her hair. On the radio the Platters are singing “Only You,” about love and destiny and the magic they bring to our threadbare lives. Our mother was magic, I see that now.
“Do you remember the time Mama made the rabbit cake for Easter?” June says.
I nod but she tells it to me anyhow: how our mother used one circle pie pan for the face, had cut the second layer into three curved slices for the ears and a bowtie. How she had made the eyes with raisins, the whiskers with licorice sticks. The carrot she’d dug out of the bottom of the icebox and stuck in the rabbit’s mouth, an orange cigar.
Whatever our mother’s shortcomings as a successful homemaker, she had had a flair for food preparation. You don’t grow up in New Orleans and not develop a palate, she’d say. She’d smothered cabbage, boiled artichokes, pickled beets, piled red beans and ham hock on steaming mounds of white rice. She mourned raw oysters and mirliton squash stuffed with shrimp, none of which was available in Opelika, just as she’d mourned her life in what she called the real world, as if the four of us, our family, were a dream she was hoping to awaken from.
JUNE THROWS HERSELF facedown on the bed. After a while she lifts her head and looks up at me, her face pocked from the spread. “Grace, we’re going to have to learn to cook or we’re going to get gangrene.” Her voice is hoarse, her bottom lip trembles. Her hair has become dull as tree bark.
We are both crying a little. Since our mother died, June has been sleeping in my bed, pressed hard against my back, fitting herself to its curve, a parenthesis to the sentence that is me. If we were standing, I would be carrying her on my back.
“Don’t you mean scurvy?”
June rolls her eyes, the sadness in them spliced with exasperation. “I’m getting Mama’s cookbook, Miss Smarty Britches.”
She heads out the bedroom door and shuffles down the hall, the bottoms of her pajama pants, too long because they were mine first, picking up dust balls. I follow, tiptoeing, though not particularly worried about our father catching us up late on a school night. Dad sleeps long hours now, staggering out in the morning, hair flattened and bathrobe inside out, the tie dragging the floor. He fills up the percolator, ignoring us as we glumly make our way through our Rice Krispies. On the weekends, he takes the radio to what’s now his bedroom. Through the closed door we hear talk of the 17th Parallel, of satellites and dominoes and more dogs in space. I picture galaxies of tethered dogs, panting and whimpering and spinning through all eternity.
My sister and I don’t often go in the room where Dad sleeps. Our mother’s blood made a dark lake on the wood floor by the bed. Dad put down a throw rug to hide the stain, but June and I know it’s there. Sometimes in the afternoons when he’s at work, we will stop at
the door and go inside. We understand that our mother’s cells are still scattered about, clinging to our fingertips like dust. On the dresser her hairbrush, strands of her living hair still in it; on the bathroom door her robe, her makeup smeared on the collar. These remnants seem airborne, drifting outside the constraints of gravity. Parts of us drift with them like pollen, neither rising nor settling.
We open our mother’s drawers and touch her things, drawing them to our faces, then lift up a corner of the rug to look at the stain. It is a secret thing we do together and don’t talk about afterward.
Mornings, hurrying past, we glimpse the empty bottle on Dad’s nightstand, the overflowing ashtray beside the rumpled bed. We worry about fire.
IN THE KITCHEN June pauses to roll up the legs of her/my pajamas, then snatches from a shelf over the stove Mama’s Holy Angels of Mercy Creole Cookbook, a tattered, grease-splattered hand-me-down from her mother. We skulk our way back to my room, bumping into each other as we glide down the tunnel of a hallway, past our father’s closed door.
Our mother had piles of cookbooks but scorned most of them. She entertained us with passages that summoned homemakers to the art of setting a pretty table, cooking eggs to their husband’s tastes, and planning garden parties. Every other recipe called for some form of Jell-O or mayonnaise, both of which she despised. They reminded her of the parish socials she had to go to as a child, where the Jell-O would melt into orange and green and red puddles and the mayonnaise would sprout a sinister yellow crust on top. Instead of following recipes, Mama made up dishes. Our favorite was something she called Chili Mac, a combination of canned chili, slices of white bread, and sharp cheddar, layered like a birthday cake in a casserole dish and baked so that the cheese ran down the sides of the bread like lava.
IN THE DAYS to come, June heads in from school, drops her books on the kitchen table. In preparation for Dad’s suppers, she eats several bowls of Rice Krispies. Then she heads back to our room, plops herself on my bed, and starts thumbing through Holy Angels of Mercy. I follow close on her heels, chiding her to do her homework, then setting a good example by pulling out my books and making a show of doing mine. With Dad floating about silently day after day, week after week, letting even his precious boxwoods go without their winter pruning, somebody needs to watch out for my sister, who cares not a whit about school. My natural bossiness rises to the occasion. After all, there’s nobody but me, no friendly aunts or uncles in town, no grandparents to call on. Our only living relative is Frances, our old-maid schoolteacher aunt in the City, our mother’s sister.
Frances is older than our mother, older than an old wet hen, Mama used to say. Frances the fussbudget, Mama called her, but on weekends when Dad had to balance the books at the mill, our mother would take us on the Greyhound bus to visit our aunt in her little cottage on Louis XIV Street. Mama dressed up for these trips, decking herself out in high heels and rhinestone earclips. Next to the country folk on the bus, she looked like she was stepping on a plane to Paris. As the bus rolled along, past tree farms and dilapidated fishing camps, her hair shone in the morning sun from the previous day’s wash-and-set, her bangs curled under like a roll of sausage. Women on the bus would steal glances at her, tuck stray wisps of hair into country buns, straighten their skirts.
Frances met us at the door, her face as open as the sky, her white blouse (she always presented herself in a white blouse and dark skirt) spotless and pressed. The oddities about our mother’s face, those features that set her apart and made her, if not pretty, at least what you’d call striking—the way the outer corners of her eyes turned up, the hawkish aspect to the brows, her overly full lips—seemed in Frances to have mutated to a strange excessiveness. Her eyebrows were set so high as to seem perpetually arched; her eyes, behind the specs she wore, stretched to slits, as if she were holding them in that position. Against such a landscape her full lips looked garish, especially when she wore the cherry-red lipstick she always globbed on when we were visiting. The only thing Frances shared in equal proportion was Mama’s moon of a face, but on Frances the roundness flattened her head front to back, making her mismatched features look pasted on by an uncoordinated child.
Frances was a do-gooder. She handed out turkey and dressing at the Salvation Army at Thanksgiving and Christmas, marched against nuclear proliferation, tutored children who couldn’t read. When the space race heated up, she demonstrated for animal rights. Sending dogs and chimpanzees into space was a crime against nature. How would we like getting tied up in a box and shot into outer darkness? Not much, she bet.
On these visits, Mama wouldn’t even bother to sit down and visit. She’d head straight for the bathroom, coming out with a perfect bow of lipstick and sooty eyebrows peeking out from under her bangs. Before our mother hightailed it out the door, Frances would push her specs back on the bridge of her nose and sing out, “Let’s all go out for supper on the town, then you can go to your honky-tonk.”
Mama would roll her eyes. “Frances, be a pal. Let a poor girl take a break from her dull-as-dishwater life.”
Then off she’d go, not to return until the early morning hours, her hair disheveled and her cheeks splotched. Frances had only one extra bedroom, so Mama slept with my sister and me, saying Frances was such a stick-in-the-mud, not to tell our aunt what time she got in. We’d watch Mama undress, cigarette smoke and rotten apples and something curdled we didn’t recognize clinging to the clothes she dropped on the floor.
After Mama headed out the door with her two dollars for the taxicab, Frances would bite her lip and then turn to survey us, the booby prizes, standing side by side, June’s head tipped sideways so that it touched my shoulder. “Well, now,” she’d say brightly, “what do you girls want to do? Can I get you anything?” We would look at each other and raise our eyebrows, sometimes asking for the moon, chocolate cake or lemon meringue pie, just so we could see Frances blink and wince and push her glasses back for the umpteenth time.
But despite her initial nervousness in our presence and our sometimes less than polite demeanor, Frances seemed to view us as objects of study, creatures of another species, younger than her high school students, as yet unformed, full of possibility. She fussed over us, called us “preteens,” a term we’d never heard but liked immensely; asked were we afraid of the Bomb, if our parents fought, whether we enjoyed music. We lied with impunity: no, we weren’t afraid of old Khrushchev; at school we’d learned how to Duck and Cover, get under our desks, put our arms over our heads; no, our parents didn’t fight, they got along like ham and eggs; yes, we adored Benny Goodman and opera, June had seen Madame Butterfly.
We kept our distance from our aunt’s person. Frances had what June and I referred to as the Lady Schoolteacher Smell, a cross between dust and mold, chalk and cloves, face powder and powdered milk. The smell wasn’t unpleasant exactly, but being around her called to mind antique shops and stuffed animals that had once been alive. It brought a vinegary taste to my mouth, like bile.
WE HAVEN’T SEEN Frances since our mother’s gravesite service when she placed herself between June and me, pressing our heads against her bony hips so that the only sound we could hear was the gurgling of her stomach. So our mouths drop open when, the Friday night after June starts her cookbook research, Frances bustles through our kitchen door with two sacks of groceries and a rectangular overnight case. Saturday morning we find her in the kitchen, wearing our mother’s daisy apron, humming “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else But Me.” She has made leathery biscuits, over which she has dumped a puttyish gravy. That afternoon she takes us for haircuts. She buys us new socks. She lets us get a half gallon of chocolate ripple ice cream at Piggly Wiggly. That night she fries up some chicken. The insides are bloody, the outsides black, all of it smelling like burnt Crisco. June and I wolf it down.
The next Friday she returns, then the next. We settle into a routine. Thanksgiving comes and goes. Frances comes in Wednesday night bearing a turkey, which she cooks to th
e consistency of cardboard the next day.
By now June has gone back to sleeping in her own room. Despite our protests, Frances insists on alternating sleeping with June one weekend and with me the next, not wanting, she says, “to turn you poor girls out of your own rooms.” June worries that the Lady Schoolteacher Smell will cling to us and our schoolmates will laugh at us behind our backs. Already, there have been sneers and whispers, a woman doesn’t just up and die of a miscarriage. Dad sat us down and told us a man had been arrested. All I can think about is that two hours at the zoo. All I want to know is when she died, not why, though we know too that our mother was not blameless in her own death; this comes to us not just from words that buzz around us like gnats, but from our father’s failure to report for the duty of assuaging our grief, his long trail of silence, which, as time goes on, we understand had already begun that last day at the zoo. He, as much as our mother, is the ghost in the house.
The Sunday after Thanksgiving Frances leaves for what we think will be her regular work week in the City but then she returns late the next afternoon. When we hear her car pull in, Dad and June and I walk out onto the driveway.
Frances gets out of the car and looks at our questioning faces. “School’s out for Christmas. Today was the last day.” She opens the back door of the car, revealing a monstrous red trunk, the kind you’d take on a sea voyage. As if on cue, a flock of gray pelicans fly over the yard in perfect formation, the flung light of late afternoon turning their wing tips to fire. The four of us look up and Frances gasps Oh!, just the way our mother would have done. A wind comes up and some papery elm pods left over from summer swish down the street.
Then Frances stands there and explains to the three of us how much we need her. She’s taken leave from her job, she’s reporting for full-time duty, now help her get her trunk into the house.
